Lot 60: Paul Yates (b.1954) BIGNIAN SNOWHEAD, 2004 signed in monogram and dated lower right; inscribed, dated and signed again on reverse oil on board 55

Paul Yates (b.1954) BIGNIAN SNOWHEAD, 2004 signed in monogram and dated lower right; inscribed, dated and signed again on reverse oil on board 55 by 44cm., 21.5 by 17.5in. Artist, poet, film-maker and sculptor, Paul Yates was born and raised in Belfast. He began writing at an early age, with the encouragement of his high school English teacher, the artist Jack Packenham. His first collection of poems and drawings, A White Cat with a Human Face, was published when he was just twenty years of age, sponsored by John Hewitt and Gladys Maccabe among others. In 1976 his second book of poems and drawings appeared and he held his first solo show of paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Further exhibitions followed at the Octagon Gallery and Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast. In 1992 he made an award winning documentary, Masters of the Canvas for BBC 2; it was later screened again as part of the Tate's 'Art in the Sixties' exhibition. Yates' poem, Dunadry Banks, was published in a limited edition with lithographs by Basil Blackshaw on behalf of UNICEF (1995) Last year the Caldwell Gallery published Mourne, again with poems by Yates and images by Blackshaw. Among numerous commissions Yates has produced a suite of video art works for Manako Corporation, Japan, and a painting for Kings College, Cambridge. Most recently Belleek have commissioned a limited edition of his Snowheads, from which series the present work derives.